Arnau Ayerbe: Cofounder at Throxy on going through YC and hitting 7 figures of ARR

0:00Hello and welcome back. I'm here with Arnau, the CEO and founder of Throxy. How are things going?

0:06Arnau Ayerbe:Things are going great. I'm excited to speak today with you. Whereabouts are you? It looks like you're in a lovely old house somewhere. We're actually today doing a company offsite this week and we're in the Cotswolds, so enjoying the English countryside. Lovely. And what's the theme of the offsite? Is it just that bonding, strategy? What's going on? We've had a very exciting Q3. We just wanted to align the company together. Just, we have fantastic culture. We want to enjoy spending time together and align for having a great Q4. And that's what we're here for. I definitely, definitely want to get into your culture because it's, you know, you do a lot of building in public.

0:47It seems like something that comes across a lot online. But before we get into that, can you just give a super quick introduction to Throxy?

0:54Arnau Ayerbe:Throxy is the easiest way to speaking with your ideal customers. So we get you in front of your ideal customers through cold email, through cold calling. We book meetings with them directly in your calendar. Amazing. Very cool. And yeah, I spoke to Pablo about it before on ETS. So yeah, it's a very cool company. It seems to be doing really, really well. But let's just go into culture, right? Because you brought it up. You're on the offsite right now. You do a lot of stuff on socials. You know, when I was trying to think about what your culture looked like from the outside in, And what I really liked about it was that it was very strong.

1:28There were really strong cultural signals that kind of came from the way that you spoke about the business and the things that you talked about. It looks like you focus a lot on hard work. You're sort of part of that, like almost like the 996 gang. You're definitely believing in like, you know, spending a lot of time in the office doing good hard work. I saw you post about punctuality and Pablo had to, you know, if you're late, you've got to bring pastries. it seems like the people that you're hiring also incredibly high standards you know like you know the guy that you hired recently was like spoke like 12 languages or something you know it seems like you've got an amazingly high caliber of people you're also quite big on wellness gym eating healthily all that kind of stuff is that an accurate representation or or are there kind of more fundamental core values that underpin your culture at Throxy I think that's quite accurate

2:19Arnau Ayerbe:we think of culture at Throxy as like building the ideal workplace where I wish existed when I went to work at my first company and a place where just like values like and incentivizes to do your great best work and for me that place or for us as founders is somewhere where you can blend play and work together where you can just like spend endless hours having fun and tackling a problem you deeply enjoy because that's where your best work is going to happen and for that for us that's a combination of like doing sport eating healthily and then being really disciplined because i've never seen extraordinary results come from like ordinary inputs um and that's why we we have like extremely high accountability between us um we like to be in the office a lot we think that's where the best ideas happen um we also like to have a separation of like where we play where we call work and where we call resting.

3:20Arnau Ayerbe:We incentivize people to take care of their sleep, take care of their nutrition, and make sure everything outside of Throxy in your life is in order. If you need to take some time off to make sure things are going well, we incentivize that. But when you're in the office, we don't want people that are just sat down in their chair just looking at the news or whatever. We want you doing deep work. and we just want to build like an environment that supports that and for us that specifically was like finding a place which had like a gym like two minutes away from it was in a nice location of london which was accessible for everyone i think one of the most important decisions like founders make when they raise their seat stage is like where your office is your office is going to be the place which is going to attract talent is going to have you spending like most of your time and if you're in a place where you want to spend an extra hour every day that means like across a single year you've worked out like 52 more hours which is more than two two full days right and I'd be worried about competitors that are in office much more than competitors that's a really like hybrid teams or a remote team and that's more or less of like how we think about like a culture in office and then we've been extremely lucky to like attract really high caliber talent which I wake up every day excited to work with we have like a very young culture which is very ambitious and we are excited to be building in Europe and be building something we think is special.

5:01Amazing yeah it's super interesting the way that you're thinking about uh building that office is like an roi you know you're really like looking at the roi of that office and and seeing it as a way to extract more more value and to kind of do more deep work um and i think which when you say that about like the balance between rest and hard work is one of those points that's always missed in the like the social media clickbait debates around 996 it's always about you know when people are pushing back against I think they don't realize that the 996 also includes time for rest and downtime. And it's about striking that balance.

5:36How do you, as a founder, strike that balance between knowing when to accelerate and work incredibly hard, long days versus knowing when you need to step back and take a break?

5:47Arnau Ayerbe:Building a company is definitely a marathon. It's not like a sprint, but there's going to be times in that period of that marathon that you're going to have to sprint. and when we were going through YC from March to June, Pablo Bergen and I were working seven days a week, probably around like 16 hours every day. I used to go to sleep with my laptop next to my bed and I wake up with like flooded with emails and notifications. It was still the three of us back then. And that period of time was like a very intense period of time where you just like have to like go flat out. And then we came back to London, you build systems, you scale and as a founder what you need to do is reinvent yourself and like hire people which are like exceptional talent and can come and like bring better ideas to the table than the ones you had because they're just able to like invest more time in this single piece of the system um and that's how we think about it and now um we encourage um everyone at the company to take saturdays completely off um even ourselves as founders we we try and do this because like the best ideas and the best breakthroughs usually happen after you've like had like a bit of time off you you see the bigger picture um and that's one of the things we try and like keep ourselves accountable of course there's saturdays i'm going to be in the office but that's just part of like what we're building and we we love doing this so it's our bread and butter yeah amazing and can you touch on your recent fundraise so you raised like a your seed round last month can you talk about how much it was who it came from and what that process was like yeah so we've raised um 6.5 million led by base 10 partners um we um initially went in march um to san francisco to be part of like the yc spring batch um during the yc spring batch we grew to a 1.5 million arr um very fast um and we knew we wanted to scale this um this is our life's work and we partnered with Base 10 alongside other amazing funds to build the next year in Kortner, Europe.

7:57Amazing, love it. And how was that process? I mean, you came out of YC. Was it between YC and over summer that you saw this growth to 1.5 million or how did that happen and how did that impact the fundraising process, I guess?

8:12Arnau Ayerbe:I think one of the things that people don't know is we actually applied for the winter batch in YC and we were already growing quite fast. I think we went from, we were at zero past October, one year ago today, and we quickly grew to 100K. We got an interview for the winter batch in YC and our group partner back then said, I think you guys are onto something, but you need to double down on a specific niche or somewhere. And then in that period of time of like two months between the winter batch application and the spring batch, with 3X our revenue to 300K ARR, because we had doubled down on people selling into traditional industries.

8:54Arnau Ayerbe:And in that application, we got into YC. During YC, we grew from 300K to 1.5 million. And at that point, we had nearly every single VC in the Valley and in Europe booking meetings in our calendar. We were very lucky that we met with Ade. from Base 10, another fellow Spaniard who's like, being a founder himself first, we went on a walk with him for 20 minutes. And I think one of the most important things when you're like raising a seed round is not the fund in itself, which Base 10 is an amazing fund, just by the investments they've made, but the partner in itself. And Ade and Caroline, and every single person we've spoken at base 10 just gave us like that gut feeling of like okay we want to go all in here um and and that was how um we made our decision amazing and can you touch on uh your growth since then is there any numbers metrics you can share since leaving yc i i think we we want to keep those to ourselves we we're going to align on the offside for for those but like we're very excited to share them i think um at the end of q4 um we'll be able to share a very exciting update it no way looking forward to it um i just want to talk a bit more about your bullying in public you know you've started being very active i think you post every single day on linkedin and they're good updates you know like i've seen lots of people post lots of people build in public i really like yours can you touch on like what's the rationale for why you're doing it and what impact you're seeing off the back of it yeah i think like one of the things um i wish i'd known when i was like back in university or when i was 18 was like how fascinating startups are in comparison to like other companies.

10:44Arnau Ayerbe:I grew up thinking like the best place to work at was going to be like a huge bank because I felt like that's where you got paid the most money. That's where the smartest people will be. That's the way to create like financial stability. And I went and did that. I spent like one year at JP Morgan. And from like my first few days in the company, I saw like how like amazing this organization is. this is like a really like great place um it's an entity that's produced a lot of um good stuff but like it's definitely like not for me right and every single person will like different things um and instead i figured and stumbled upon like paul graham's essays um i started reading these i was like wow working at the startup must be so exciting um and i only came across these because I was like searching like um places of the internet that I didn't even remember how I ended up on them and my only goal with building and probably is like if I can inspire like one builder to like go and like do his own thing or like go and join a startup instead of like making um the kind of like choice I made which I don't regret because I think it was great for me um but just inspiring people to build more um and just showing how like interesting startups are um that's like our goal um in itself yeah i love it and yeah i i had a similar experience i started my my career in strategy consulting and it was you know i don't regret it because i'm where i am today but i also wouldn't recommend it you know i if you always tell people if you're interested in tech then you should just get into tech and you should just do it as soon as you possibly can i think going further i think like startups are like just they get no marketing they're undersold right and like just like pulling like seeing behind the curtains of like what building a company is um it's just like for us really useful to keep us accountable of like why are we doing this um it's helpful with distribution um we're not gonna lie here either and like attracting top talent like um some of the people like we've we've attracted to come like work at throxy i think would have never come if like they they never knew about our brand yeah i think that's what you're doing like absolutely brilliantly and like better than anyone else have seen is like really sell the culture of throxy through linkedin and socials and building in public you're not you're not just talking about results metrics it really feels like a fun place to work and that you have a good vibe and i think that's what you're doing so well um i think the word for that is actually like just being human yeah just like human and like you just actually are honest with the people you build a place you want to you you want to exist um things great things just happen yeah yeah no it's super interesting to hear that that's yeah i mean it makes total sense you know that it's useful for attracting talent because it's um yeah it looks great um i saw that you met with harry harry stebbings recently like can you talk on like how did that come about what were you chatting about we we just bumped into each other on the street um we caught up on like project europe all the great companies that are building in Europe.

13:55Arnau Ayerbe:We've obviously made an intended choice to stay here in London, and I think initiatives like the one you're doing with Scaling Europe are fantastic. I think there's a lot of great private companies here, Eleven Labs, Synthesia, which we have Victor today. There's actually a lot of great builders in this continent, and specifically in the UK, because we have great schools with Oxbridge, with Imperial, and how we can make sure builders get more access to resources, which is what the Bali is great at. It has a great ecosystem of getting builders instantly connected to capital. It has a very positive sum mentality and great culture, which I think we're building here through better events, through having better access to capital.

14:49Arnau Ayerbe:But there's still a long way. And obviously, Harry, yourself and many other founders in Europe are building. Were you tempted to stay in the Valley at all after YC? I think it's always tempting because it's as a founder, like you feel the energy and it's fantastic. We are in the Valley very regularly. We're actually making a trip in the next couple of weeks. but we think of lending as our base for now. Amazing and where are you seeing sales are you having to sell a lot to the west coast east coast are you seeing customers in Europe primarily what's that split and balance look like? Well we obviously during our period we were in YC we partnered with a lot of companies in San Francisco there's nothing better than going and meeting your customers in person and being able to support them through that.

15:49Arnau Ayerbe:We're also helping a lot of companies here in Europe and now in the UK. There is something to be said that American companies are able to attract much larger deals and I think that's something we're still far from getting in the UK. So most of our revenue is actually coming from American companies and our customers. but we want to support both American companies and great European companies. And are you thinking about hiring at all in the US? We're currently not hiring in the US because we want to be like fully in person but we will be opening an office in San Francisco and in New York in due time.

16:34Arnau Ayerbe:We just think of focus as a multiplier on work and we're extremely focused on making our London office very powerful and we think we can get very far with that. Love it. No, it sounds great. Well, look, Ana, thank you so much for joining. I'll let you go and enjoy the rest of your offsite. But yeah, I love what you're building and I love what you've achieved today. So let's stay in touch. Thanks for having me. Thanks. Speak soon.